Underground infra: A planning blind spot

As water turns toxic, tunnels flood, a deeper failure surfaces—absence of underground planning and governance in cities

- Manoj Sharma

In Indore recently, sewage contaminated a drinking water pipeline running beneath a residential neighbourhood, killing at least 10 people. Officials blamed the tragedy ona cracked pipe; the angry residents complained of years of negligence.

However, the failure runs deeper—and remains largely unseen.

Above ground, Indian cities are governed by many layers of rules—land use is zoned, building heights regulated, setbacks enforced, and environmental clearances contested and monitored. But below ground, there is no such regime.

So, who governs the city below?

Pretty much no one.

Experts say this vacuum should no longer be ignored as Indian cities dig deeper than ever—for Metro tunnels and road underpasses, parking basements and malls, water pipelines, sewer lines, and utilities.

The absence of subterranean governance is increasingly leading to dangerous consequences. Drinking water turns toxic, as it did in Indore. Sewer gases kill sanitation workers in manholes with alarming regularity. Basements turn into death traps during heavy rains. And more often than not, every incident is dismissed asa local failure—mostly contractor negligence—while the deeper governance vacuum remains ignored.

“These incidents essentially reflect gaps in planning, governance and design related to subsurface infrastructure,” RK Goel, former chief scientist at CSIR-CIMFR , who specialises in underground space design and tunnelling.

Architect Manit Rastogi, founding partner at Morphogenesis, agrees that basement drownings and tunnel flooding in Delhi, groundwater contamination in Indore, and other such incidents are not freak accidents but predictable outcomes of a failure to govern underground space. “Indian urban planning remains largely two-dimensional. We regulate the surface but treat the underground as an unregulated frontier,” he says.